Who Should Read This Book? This book addresses the large knowledge gap between UX design and business strategy. It was written with the following types of product makers in mind: Entrepreneurs, digital product managers, and intrapreneurial teams You want to lead your team — visual and UX designers, developers, marketers, and so on — to craft a successful product with a killer UX. However, there are limitations on your time, cash, and other resources, and that means focusing your team’s efforts on techniques of applied simplicity, or putting the most essential and affordable tools into practice. You understand Lean Startup principles and want to cut corners on research and evaluation, but you also know that you need to make decisions based on a sound strategy. This book will provide you and your team with the necessary lightweight tools for testing value propositions, finding opportunities for creating value in the marketplace, and designing for conversion. UX/Interaction/UI Designers You’re frustrated. You feel like you are a cog in the wheel making design deliverables. You want your work to be more innovative and strategically sound, but you aren’t involved with product definition at a strategic level. You fear that you are hitting a career wall because you don’t have a business degree or marketing expertise. This book will teach you how to push back when you find yourself in the following situations: You’re assigned to create a site map and wireframes for a product that you believe is just a rip-off of an existing one. You don’t want to spend the next six months reinventing the wheel. This book will show you how to be innovative by systematically cherry-picking from your competitors. You have a stakeholder who is 100 percent certain that his product vision is right, and you are told to implement it as is. You want to do user research to help him deviate from his original vision, but he won’t give you the budget. This book will demonstrate different options for being intrapreneurial with or without buy-in. You get handed a massive requirements document for a transactional product and are told to come up with a design that will increase conversion. This book will show you how to break down the stages of engagement and map desired actions to metrics.